Is Artix Linux Just A Protest Distro?

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:00]So, today I'm going to revisit a Linux distribution that I've taken a look at several times over the years, but it's been a while since I've taken a look at Artix Linux. What is Artix Linux? Artix is an Arch Linux based distribution, except its claim to fame is it doesn't use systemd. So, back in the day when systemd was becoming popular and some of the major Linux distributions were adopting systemd, Arch Linux was one of the first ones to switch over from sysvinit over to systemd, and some people got mad about it. They they got their panties twisted in a bunch and they wanted to fork Arch Linux and create something that was Arch without systemd. They created Artix Linux. It's basically what I like to call a protest distro. There's several of these distributions out there where they start life basically as a protest to the parent project, right? Linux Mint is very famously a protest distro. It was started because "Hey, we want to be Ubuntu, but we don't want to be associated with Ubuntu, so we're going to create a distribution that bases off of Ubuntu, but we're not Ubuntu, right?"

[00:01:06]Artix Linux is "Hey, we're going to be Arch Linux, but we don't want nothing to do with systemd." Devuan wants to be Debian, but not associated in any way with systemd, right? These start life sometimes as protest distros and sometimes they morph into something more than just a protest. I'm not sure if that's the case with Artix. It's been a while since I've taken a look at it, and let's see what I think. I'm going to go ahead and grab an ISO of their latest release. They've got several different ISOs. I'm going to grab the latest release that was just issued about a week ago. I'm going to grab the XFCE edition with the dinit system. So, they offer several different init systems.

[00:01:46]You have OpenRC, S6, and runit. I'm going to choose dinit though for this video.

[00:01:53]So, I created a virtual machine here and I'm going to run through a quick installation of Artix because it's been a while since I've taken a look at their installation as well. Uh so, when you first boot into the ISO here, you have the opportunity to change the time, the time zone, your keymap, your language if you need it. For me, all of this is fine, so I'm just going to go ahead and boot from the ISO.

[00:02:18]And one thing you're probably not going to get on the video cuz I'll cut out some dead air, but I've been waiting probably a good 60 seconds now for the uh live environment to load up the graphical environment. Now, I believe this latest version of Artix is using the Xlibre uh display server rather than your standard X11 display server. So, Xlibre is a modern kind of fork, a continuance of X11, but it does look like slowly the XFCE desktop environment is loading. Now, this is a live environment, so it being it being kind of slow isn't uh necessarily a big deal, but after installation of it's still kind of this slow, this will be a big deal. All right, so it looks like the desktop environment has loaded. Well, it loaded everything except the wallpaper. I'm sure it you know, okay, there it goes.

[00:03:08]It just >> [laughter] >> took a second for everything to finally load. I'm going to go ahead and click the icon down here that says install Artix, and I'm assuming that's going to launch us into the Calamares installer.

[00:03:22]Ooh, something is going on here. Okay, select which kind of Calamares you want.

[00:03:26]Do you want the online, which is experimental, or do you want offline?

[00:03:30]And it says go with offline, so online must be very experimental, probably just for devs testing things. So, go with the offline installation.

[00:03:39]All right, and the Calamares installer finally loaded. That took about 30 seconds or so to load, but the installation process, if you've seen the Calamares installer before, you know, there's really not much to it. I'm going to move the window over here. So, the first screen is choosing the language, and this is the language for the installation program itself, so the installer's using American English by default. That's fine for me. I should be able to read everything in that. And then the time zone, it is incorrectly chosen the Eastern time zone in the US for me. I need the Central time zone, so I'm going to move over to Indiana here.

[00:04:12]So, and then I'm going to click next. Of course, I'm not in Indiana, but you know, that's the time zone. That's the right time zone for me. So, uh keyboard, English US is correct for me, so I don't need to change that, so I'll just click next. And then, what do I want to do?

[00:04:26]Erase disk and give the whole drive over to Artix, or do I want to do a manual partitioning? And this would be something you would need to do if you wanted to do uh a dual boot situation or something more exotic. For me, I'm just going to give the whole drive of this virtual machine over to Artix. By default, it wants to create a swap with hibernate, and this is a big deal. If you're going to test this in a VM, do not create this swap because the swap it's going to create is a 9 GB swap. So, this is way too big of a swap, right?

[00:04:56]This this is eating up all of your disk space, you know, the virtual drive space. So, do not do that swap. As a matter of fact, let's go ahead either choose no swap because in a VM, do you really need a swap? Probably not. Or, if you want a swap, do swap to file, and swap to file uh gets rid of that gigantic swap partition, right? Because it dynamically writes to a file on the system, so it's only taking up space when it's needed, and it's never going to take up, you know, 9 GB of space. So, now that that is done, let's click next.

[00:05:29]Let's create our username. I'm going to call my user DT, and then let's create the hostname of this computer. So, I'll call this Artix-VM. If I ever have to SSH into this virtual machine, I'll know this is my Artix virtual machine. And now let me create a strong and complicated password for the DT user.

[00:05:47]And then repeat the strong and complicated password.

[00:05:50]And then require strong passwords, that's ticked off. And then log in automatically without asking for password, that's ticked off. Leave that ticked off. You want to have to enter a password to get into a machine just for privacy reasons. And then use the same password for the administrator account, the sudo account. Yes, I will tick that on. That way DT's password and the sudo password are the same password. That way I don't have to remember two different passwords. And then click next, and we get a summary, and everything looks good here, so I'm going to click the install button, and away we go. This portion of the installation typically takes about 5 to 10 minutes on my machine. So, I'm going to step away, grab a cup of coffee, and I'll be back once Artix has finished installing.

[00:06:34]And the installation completed and I rebooted, and we got a GRUB screen.

[00:06:38]Everything looks like it worked.

[00:06:42]And we get our login manager. The login manager looks like they're using LightDM, and let me go ahead and log in as the DT user here. And once again, it's taking a while for the desktop environment to load here. I'm sure it will eventually load, but and this is probably because they moved from Xorg to Xlibre, a new display server. Could be a driver issue here inside the virtual machine. I may experiment with some different video drivers at some point to see if that improves things.

[00:07:15]But right now, at least initially, it just just loading the desktop environment is slow. I don't know if you know, once it loads, things will probably be fine. All right, and the desktop environment has loaded here, or at least I think it has. It's still loading some stuff up here in the system tray.

[00:07:30]Yeah.

[00:07:32]And let's see. If I click applications, is this our menu here?

[00:07:37]Yeah, the menu is kind of slow. Let me click to the side.

[00:07:42]Yeah, this is probably just a video driver issue here in the virtual machine. Typically on these Virt Manager virtual machines, I use the virtio driver, which typically is the best performing driver for almost every situation. Occasionally, I'll need to experiment with some other stuff if a distribution strays a little bit off the beaten path, which Artix, again, using Xlibre, maybe I should experiment with some of those other drivers, but let's stick with virtio for now. So, very quickly, I'm just going to open the menu system and see what is installed at least out of the box here on Artix with XFCE. Under accessories, it looks like we have a lot of the standard XFCE tools, the application finder, the bulk rename tool, the clipboard manager. We have both Leafpad and Mousepad as plain text editors. That's interesting, they include both. Mousepad is the standard one that ships with XFCE. Leafpad was the text editor that shipped with the old LXDE desktop environment. But it's your standard plain text editor, both of them are. Uh not much to them, very unsexy, right?

[00:08:49]It's both of them are very much akin to the old Windows Notepad program, right?

[00:08:55]Very simple uh in their appearance and in function. This is Mousepad 0.7.0.

[00:09:01]Let's close that out, close the window here. Back into the menu, back into accessories. We have a note-taking application, we have screenshot tool, we have the XFCE task manager. Thunar is the file manager. Vim is installed out of the box, that's good. Xfburn is an XFCE disk burning utility for those that still burn CDs, DVDs. Um you know, and for me, I still do, but most people probably won't have a use case for that.

[00:09:29]Let's open up Thunar, the file manager, though. Thunar is one of the better file managers we have on Linux. It's always been one of the most popular ones. Even people that don't necessarily run XFCE often install Thunar. A lot of window manager users, tiling window manager users often install Thunar. And this is Thunar 4.20.8.

[00:09:54]And let me close that out. So, it looks like we have a full suite of applications installed here. A lot of stuff installed. I'm curious about internet, though. What web browser do we have? We have web installed. Please tell me that's not like the GNOME browser, the web browser. What is it?

[00:10:11]Epiphany or something? Why would you not install a proper web browser, something like a Firefox or Chromium? You know, we have so many great free and open source browsers.

[00:10:23]Why default to this monstrosity? And then it's taking a while for this browser to load in this VM here. But, let's go into the menu system and go to about web here.

[00:10:35]And this is the GNOME project web 49.6.

[00:10:40]And yeah, one of the reasons why the browser was probably taking a while to load here. I just noticed it opened a bunch of tabs by default. I guess that was some default settings. They're going to open the GT for Artix, the wiki for Artix, the forum for Artix, and the homepage for Artix, as well as the DistroWatch page. I guess they're trying to game the DistroWatch rankings. That's really kind of lame, Artix guys.

[00:11:08]You're trying to boost your DistroWatch rankings by forcing people to go to the DistroWatch page via one of the million tabs you've got open here.

[00:11:18]Yeah. Yeah, very very poor judgment on your part.

[00:11:23]I'm sure a lot of people are fans of Artix for their non-systemd kind of stance, if you're one of those people.

[00:11:30]But, you know, I also don't appreciate being manipulated and helping you rise in your DistroWatch ranks. Shame on you.

[00:11:38]Under multimedia, not much here. MPV is here for our video player. We also have the Parole media player, another video player. Although, you could also use this to play your your audio as well. You could use MPV even to play audio. So, both of them kind of serve that dual function. Under the office category, nothing here. We have a PDF viewer, Atril, and then we have a dictionary program as well. And then settings, a lot of the XFCE settings stuff. Nothing really to to see here. So, you know, what is making Artix unique? How does it stand out from Arch Linux? Well, let's open a terminal.

[00:12:17]Let's take a look under the hood a little bit. So, let's see. I'm going to make this terminal full screen here.

[00:12:24]This is taking a long time for the animation to work. Again, this is probably a video driver issue.

[00:12:30]I'm certain it probably has something to do with the the Xlibre situation here. But, this is the XFCE 4 terminal 1.2.0.

[00:12:41]Let's close that. So, let me zoom in here a little bit so we can get so you guys can see what I'm going to type here. First, let's get the kernel.

[00:12:49]Now, this is Arch Linux, so we should be on a very recent kernel, right? And we are 6.19.11.

[00:12:56]So, what makes Artix unique, obviously, is there is no systemd. So, if I, you know, do something like a where is, you know, systemd or something. We do have some libraries from systemd installed.

[00:13:08]We don't have a binary installed, but that is interesting. Another thing is because Artix is non-systemd, I'm going to use a dinit as the run as the init system on this VM. Since we're not using systemd, they do have to maintain some of their own repositories and packages because of that non-systemd stuff, right? They have some compatibility issues. Some programs and libraries, they have to maintain themselves. So, if I did something like let's vim the /etc/pacman.conf, I'm sure we're going to see some of their own repositories in this file. So, let me scroll. I went to the bottom of the document, but I just wanted to see yeah, they've got some interesting things here. Yeah, repositories called galaxy, galaxy-gremlins, world-gremlins.

[00:13:58]Yeah, the gremlins repositories are disabled by default. I don't know what these repositories are, but again, these are not standard Arch repositories.

[00:14:06]These are repositories for Artix. They also have parallel downloads turned on by default. They also have the I love candy effect turned on by default. What is I love candy? Well, when you run a pacman -Syu, you get the little pacman chomping as you get the the updates. I'm curious if I did a where is Xlibre, would that return any information? I'm just wondering what the Xlibre package is. Let me do this command here. pacman -Q -q. So, this is all the packages that were installed via pacman. I'm going to grep Xlibre.

[00:14:46]And yeah, so it's a lot of Xlibre stuff.

[00:14:49]So, when you install like the Xorg packages, they're typically Xorg- server- you know, things, right? But, these packages are Xlibre-various things, including some video drivers as well. So, that is good. Although, the drivers, again, on at least on [clears throat] this machine, this virtual machine, do seem to be a little clunky. One other thing I want to do is a where is pipewire, because I do know that they used to default to PulseAudio and not pipewire, but yeah, these days they are using pipewire as the audio server.

[00:15:25]So, let me clear the screen here. Now, on this system, I ended up downloading an ISO that used the dinit init system. Again, on Artix, you have OpenRC as an option, you have runit as an option, you have s6 as an option. You have all the various init systems as an option, except systemd. They don't allow you to do systemd. Systemd's not there, right? So, yeah, it's on their homepage, they're like, "Hey, you've got freedom as far as init systems." Well, freedom except systemd.

[00:15:57]But, dinit, I've never actually used this, but you know, I've read the man page a little bit, and they have something like a dinitctl similar to like a systemctl you would use for systemd. And you know, you would do something like a dinitctl start service or dinitctl stop service. For example, if I wanted to start, I don't know, the SSH daemon or something, you know, I could start, you know, something like that or stop it if it was already running. If I wanted to see the status of a service, I could do dinit status name of service.

[00:16:34]Or I wonder if I could do dinitctl status with no service. No, it won't. I was hoping I could get a list of everything, but how about status of SSHD?

[00:16:44]No service. How about just SSH?

[00:16:47]No. How about service MySQL? I'm sure that's not here. Right, service not loaded. Yeah. So, a lot of stuff obviously is not loaded, but if you had some services that you needed to manage, dinitctl stop and start and status are the ways to manage those. And just quickly, I pulled up a man page here just to see if I could find the command to list sort services. Yeah. So, yeah, nothing's loaded. So, that's why none of these dinit statuses and dinit stops and starts would work, cuz there's literally nothing running right now. So, that's it for this very quick and cursory look of Artix Linux. And this again, this ISO was XFCE with dinit. You have the opportunity to download ISOs using Artix with Plasma, Cinnamon, LXQt, LXDE. They've got a lot of desktop environments available on ISOs, and they have ISOs for all those desktop environments with dinit, OpenRC, runit, or s6. So, lots of ISOs to choose from.

[00:17:50]Now, again, what is Artix's claim to fame? Well, it's all about just not having systemd as an option. Does that make this a rather unique distribution?

[00:17:59]Maybe [clears throat] if you care about the init system, I don't. I don't care what init system a distribution uses. I'm going to use it if I like the distribution. The init system really shouldn't matter that much. A lot of these protest distros, especially the systemd protest distros like a Artix or a Devuan, they often talk about, "Well, because we don't have systemd, we don't have this big bloated thing on our system.

[00:18:23]It's better for privacy and security."

[00:18:25]I'm not sure that's necessarily the case. Maybe it is, but they often talk about because systemd is such a big heavy program, "Hey, because systemd's not on your system, you're going to see better performance."

[00:18:36]And at least in the case of this virtual machine, the performance in this thing, it ran like a dog. Now, that had nothing to do with the init system. That was probably strictly them moving over to Xlibre. And that that situation will probably get better. Xlibre still kind of new, and you know, virtual machine drivers may or may not support Xlibre all that great right now. On physical hardware, this thing probably would have run just fine. So, if you're somebody that is looking for an Arch Linux-based distribution, but you don't want systemd, give Artix a try. Now, before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this program. Matt, Steve, George, Darloff, Lee, Mark, Methos, Aryan, Peace Arch and Fedora, Reality Check for Less, Roland, Morgaine and Ubuntu, and Willie.

[00:19:20]These guys, they're my highest tier patrons over on Patreon. Without these guys, this quick look at the latest release of Artix Linux would not have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen. All these names you're seeing on the screen right now, these are all my supporters over on Patreon, because I don't have any corporate sponsors. I'm sponsored by you guys, the community. If you like my work, want to see more videos about free and open source software like Artix Linux, subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. These guys.